


Beast of the river

by Artherra



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (again because i cannot write fic without it having fish in it in some significant way), Alternate Universe - Daemons, Beholding!Sasha, Czech!Sasha, Fish, Gen, Polish!Martin, Sasha James Lives, acearo!Sasha, but i gave it some cool imagery bc why not, daemon AU, hhhnnnngng what else, is this a fix-it? probably, jonmartin is featured but also not a focus, other characters appear but i'm only tagging these few bc they're the focus, projection ahoy, this is a love letter to friendship idk what else to write, this is a short-ish rewrite of the entire plot where nobody dies so spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:28:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24479491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artherra/pseuds/Artherra
Summary: Sasha’s daemon settles as a pleco.An ancistrus, the classic kind with dark brown armored plates coated with white dots and round, striped fins; nothing special, on its own. She blends easily with the driftwood in her tank.[a Daemon AU retelling of the entire plot of the magnus archives from Sasha's POV]
Relationships: Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker
Comments: 11
Kudos: 31





	Beast of the river

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so, I wrote this in like a week and it's a projection fest but I hope you'll like it!  
> BIG thanks to Naomi who supported me through all of the brainstorming and the sudden and ultra-specific trivia rambles and all that comes with writing, and also to Cat who beta-ed this and helped me get rid of the forest of semicolons, ily both
> 
> specific CWs: stabbing, blood, suffocation, dissociation and the other Lonely usual, canon typical mentions of blinding self in order to leave the institute

Sasha’s daemon settles as a pleco.

An ancistrus, the classic kind with dark brown armored plates coated with white dots and round, striped fins; nothing special, on its own. She blends easily with the driftwood in her tank.

It’s one of the only pieces of luck that the world grants her; that she kept a tank as a teenager, a simple 30-liter thing for some glowlight tetras and cories and not much more. She remembers waking up with Arumis, panicked and sniping at her from the tank that she can’t change, that they’ve settled. Remembers the horror stories that flashed through her mind too, accompanied with a ghostly certainty that a Sasha from a parallel universe — who hadn’t made the impulsive decision to spend her monthly savings on a filter for a tank her friend ever-so-generously offered to her when her own guppy died from neglect — had just bitten the dust.

It wouldn’t be that uncommon. Each country ran statistics on how many people die each year from their daemons settling as the wrong animal and fish always lead the list.

She recalls unthinkingly and still half-asleep deciding to just head for the cupboard for a glass and feeling the string in her snap taut and unyielding. The second she realized that her own soul took a part of her freedom. The epiphany shaved the last of the dreamy haze off of her mind, as she called out to her mom until she came into the room, eyes narrowed until they may not have been open at all and frowning on the edge of anger. 

During the quiet conversation over cups of the nicest tea they had, Arumis stuck herself to the side of the glass and wagged her tail in sharp, cutting motions, fins raised and gills taking in water, her heartbeat faster than Sasha’s own.

While she watched Arumis with awe, her mother’s heavy gaze spoke of anxiety.

From that morning on, her life became a never-ending series of haphazard solutions.

They couldn’t afford for Sasha to go into the special schools; the ones for kids whose daemons settle as water creatures, specifically equipped to allow some sort of relative freedom and companionship in solidarity. Instead of that, Sasha got a jar faintly smelling of pickles for a transport tank and a look of pity from her teacher as she helped her dig out the old cramped aquarium from the school’s storage room.

It didn’t stop her from feeling reckless pride the first week after that, with the 10-liter perched on her desk, even when Arumis ruined it by attempting to become one with the gravel. It made her feel special, unique, as the daemons of her classmates began to settle as dogs and cats and birds. It felt great until it felt lonely; until the words said behind her back got directed at Arumis as well. The fair amount of misconceptions about fish daemons starting to catch up to them.

It feels great, until one of the classmates who’s always sort of hated her, really, ever since their eyes met in a fierce argument about moral dilemmas neither of them really understood, comes to her and looms so close it makes her press against the desk. Until his daemon, Demetra — a magpie, always so beautiful with little, cruel black eyes — dives from his shoulder to the aquarium behind Sasha’s back and drags Arumis out of the water flailing and squirming.

That is the day she learns how it feels to choke.

He hadn’t expected her to fall, choking on air and digging her nails into her neck either, clearly, from the way he yells in panic at his daemon, a fear on his face that she had never seen before.

They don’t speak of it again and he apologizes, years later, when she’s haunted by depression and a feeling of wrongness that never seems to leave as she watches her classmates pair off into happy couples and drinks beer on hangouts just to feel included. She smiles at him, a surface thing not reaching her eyes, and decides, simply, to let it go. Bristling under the weight of emotions like Arumis does whenever Sasha vacuums the gravel.

One misconception, common and so well-trusted that she internalizes it to explain the empty place she feels inside her, is that people with fish daemons are untouchable and impersonal. Hiding behind glassy eyes and silence with an unchanging expression and a glass wall to put a crown to it.

When she leaves her mother’s language and the country that birthed her behind for England and its promises, she resembles the stereotype quite well.

—

University ends up being exactly what she expected and everything but, like an oxymoron, the definition of which she knows front and back for the fear of her native language tainting it. Few people notice anyway, as her English became near-perfect long before graduation, but the accent shadows her words and makes the r’s too harsh and her language stumbles over the names of cigarettes with the r’s and l’s too close together. 

Arumis never gives it up; talks to her in the language she knows first even when Sasha snipes at her in frustration to stop it. Never even tries to rid herself of the sharp ends of her s’s and the cheating on her th’s and the syllables that come and go like the turning of gears in a machine, instead of a slow tide that blends letters together. 

Sasha tells her not to speak at all, and Arumis bristles with all her fins raised. Whispers, the letters sharp and dancing: “I don’t know where you think this will get you, but I don’t want to follow, _Sašo._ ”

She turns the tank lights on as an act of petty revenge and goes back to studying.

— 

It’s another misconception that drags her all the way to a researcher position; through the trial of university where she firmly closes her eyes whenever Arumis speaks, through trying and failing for friendship or more with the three other people with fish daemons she notices on campus. 

The people that have looked at Arumis munching something on the glass of the aquarium and immediately asked Sasha if she was going to end up as a cleaning lady.

(She knows well how much people don’t think about the meaning of daemons, ones they don’t know immediately or which aren’t their own. That unfortunately doesn’t make a great case of a repellant for irritation when it happens again and again.)

She doesn’t expect to get the position at the institute, not really. She already got in trouble several times in libraries for the fear of the water getting to the books and a research institute is bound to have mountains of paper, but she figures out she has nothing to lose.

She does get the position — practical research, go figure — and hates it. 

Research after that has to go without an aquarium on hand, which Arumis loathes, but both of them were ready to accept anything if it would get them out of the range of Artifact storage.

And nobody judges her when her accent starts slipping. Until eventually it stops, and Arumis adjusts.

-

She doesn’t get close to them; the attempts and subsequent failures of her tragic college life were enough of an experience for a decade or two, she decides; but she likes them. Lets herself be dragged into comfortable jokes, helps with the files; goes drinking with them when the chance arises. 

She likes Timothy from the second he comes in, pretty much.

He greets her already jovial. On her side, what she returns to the unfamiliar face behind a desk facing her own is a blank uncomprehending stare. She came in late because the nice transportation tank she bought as a celebration of the first successful year in London had broken the day before. Finding an appropriate replacement took the better part of the night and the stress-filled fallout of that claimed the early morning. 

The room is empty but for the two of them; it, too, makes her even more out of it with the anxious impulse of _Oh my g-d I’m in the wrong building aren’t I, I should get out, Jesus, Sasha what the fuck, am I 100% sure I even work here—_

“Hello,” she says, dumbfounded, when he shakes her hand a few minutes after an introduction her brain forgot to process, and that’s when he notices the sad excuse for a tank sitting on her desk.

He perks up. “Is that your—“ 

“Arumis.”

“What?”

“Her— her name is Arumis.”

His eyes make a journey mirroring the daily route taken by the sun as he, much slower, utters “...okay,” but recovers the conversation immediately; even before she begins returning from astral projecting seven centimeters to the left.

“What is she?”

“Uh, an—an ancistrus.”

“Oh cool!” He exclaims, followed by an equally joyful: “What’s that?” 

“A pleco.”

Blank stare. 

She mirrors him with uncomprehending nonchalance staring into his eyes but not really _seeing_ him; doesn’t realize the room has fallen silent until—

She returns to the land of the living with an “Oh _shit_ , sorry!”

His smile, damn him, only continues to get warmer as she sputters because her brain conveniently yeeted the one word she needs and g-d not now—

“It’s an, a common aquarium fish, you’d, uh, find it in any normal tank, really, I mean, other than saltwater because they hate saltwater which doesn’t equate to hardness, mind you, because Arumis always has me put salt in it even though that’s not how it’s meant to— oh fuck. _Shit_. Sorry, oh my g-d.”

He actually laughs, as she struggles to make it through the shock of swearing three times in a row in a serious work environment. Traitor. 

“G-d. I—uh,”

He must see her panic because he immediately moves a step away with a “No, it’s cool! It’s cool.”

“Cool. Okay.”

“Okay.”

Another moment of silence in which nobody moves. The plank on the floor to her right proves to be awfully interesting.

She clears her throat. “Sorry, what was your name again?”

—

She doesn’t catch sight of his daemon for almost the entire day; looks thoroughly at his clothes and his desk, searching for the blur of feather or fur.

Talking to him comes easy, with her guard already forced down, unsalvageable from their first five minutes of introduction. But it’s because of him, as well; easy and confident, but serious when he feels he needs to be.

With the others, it was hit or miss and never tended to get anywhere else than _I am currently engaging in what is called ‘small talk’ with this person who is my coworker and it is going fairly smoothly. Yay, my social skills._

Notable exceptions include Martin; notable for most of their interactions going utterly terrible through no fault of their own; sometimes people simply have too many walls up and an abundance of off-shooting stress. Their friendship, then, doesn’t include as much talking as action; tea and helping and saving each other from uncomfortable interrogations from their coworkers about their personal life, and that eventually makes it something close to comfortable.

With Tim, though, time just flies.

She catches the seconds of nervousness under his jokes and the “I am adjusting to this new environment” moments when his questions slip to something non-sarcastic and genuine and, occasionally, determined in a way she can’t decipher. She tries her best to help; it takes a few minutes before she recounts the sudden absence of all four of her coworkers. How Davis has transferred elsewhere in the Institute and Mary has been on vacation for nearly a week, coincidentally at the same time as Theresa; the empty space behind Martin’s desk is much harder to explain. She doesn’t worry much. Something something library again, maybe.

“If I can ask,” she starts, because g-d she truly doesn’t know any non-awkward way to ask that, “where’s, uh, your—“ she makes a vague motion towards the tank with her hands, “daemon? You don’t have to tell me of course, I’m—“

She stops herself before another tirade comes out. “Just curious.”

The grin that spreads on his face is one of the widest she’d ever seen.

At that point, she expects a cocker spaniel to jump out from below his desk, or a husky, or something like a sparrow to fly out from where his bag lies open by his chair. Her mind thinks of cories (kind, curious, energetic) for a second with a sad pang, but she knows that’s not it; he would’ve known about plecos. 

It’s that derailing train of thought that has her distracted enough to squeal when he all but flails a foot-long millipede into her face.

“ _Jesus Christ._ ”

Two thoughts spring in her mind. One, a vivid memory of her digging into the soil of her middle school's herb garden as a replacement for PE classes and sometimes finding little millipedes; which she’d put into her hand and wait until they unfurl tiny leg by tiny leg and the tickling their marching limbs across her skin brought. Two, that thing is huge.

Tim guffaws and takes the half-curled, quietly protesting insect back, gently placing her (him? Them?) on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry—“

“No, no, don’t be,” he chuckles. “This never gets old.”

Then, he stands and motions on the shiny black animal attempting to crawl under his clothing as if he were announcing a king.

“Sasha, meet Balthazar,” and then reverses the gesture: “Balthazar, meet Sasha.”

Balthazar responds to Sasha’s hello with a puzzled “Whaa—“ before he (?) turns to Tim.

“Why are we meeting new people?” 

Tim rolls his eyes. “Balt, be nice.”

“We know enough people _already._ ”

“He’s a bit shy,” Tim whispers to her as he lifts the corner of his jacket and allows Balthazar to crawl below.

It’s her turn to chuckle. “Can’t relate. Aru’s a tad too bold sometimes.”

The pleco speaks up from where she’s stuck upside down against the tank wall. “Sasha, do me a favor and check for glass houses before you throw stones next time, hm?”

Tim and Sasha both laugh, even more so when Arumis wiggles in excitement.

—

“What’s Martin’s daemon?” Tim asks her a few months in, after Martin leaves his desk to search for a book he needs and apparently displaced. It’s just them, again, how it frequently ends up; the three hardworking types together until late working hours.

He’s staring at the empty chair with an odd expression, unsure and thinking, biting at his lip.

“Uh..” Should she tell him? The only reason she knew was that she managed to sneak up on Martin when he didn’t expect it and also the Incident that they don’t talk about anymore; but at the same time, it’s an everyday thing. Everybody has a daemon. She knows why Martin hides his, or at least she knows a part of it, but there’s no harm in telling, right?

“He…has a garden spider.” Hardworking, helpful, unnoticed. “You know, those tiny little guys you’d find in your garden, brown, striped legs, perched in a web? One of those.”

“Oh!” He says with the same enthusiasm as he had with her, and with Mary’s fox and Theresa’s field mouse, but there’s something more to it. Bug solidarity, probably. “I assume he hides it because of...others?”

“Arachnophobes? Yeah.”

Breath in. Chuckle.

“You’ve heard of the Incident?”

He nods. “Was that about…?” He says, gesturing at Martin’s desk.

“Yeah. Well, that was when Charlie — she’s not here anymore, transferred a few months before you came in — when she noticed the little guy on Martin’s desk and, well, fucking lost it.” She can remember the yelling well enough, as well as Martin’s full-body flinch and the way he hunched, cupping the spider into his hands in a constant current of apologies. “Screaming and almost flattening him with a folder and all that.”

“Oh my _g-d_.”

“Yeah. We don’t talk about it now.” For Martin’s sake, really. The others might not like him, but this they respect.

Tim frowns. “That’s really shitty. Christ.” 

She sighs. “I think it really messed Martin up. He avoided us for like a month.”

“I would’ve too.” He looks off at the wall. “I...have, actually.”

“Hm?”

“Done that, I mean. Not many people react well to insects and sometimes, size worsens it.” He says, petting Balthazar over his shiny exoskeleton as he crawls up Tim’s arm. “It gets...really awkward.”

“Oh. Right.”

They fall into silence, comfortable and open. Sasha turns to her files and searches for the passage where she ended.

He gives the room a thousand-yard stare. “I don’t get what people have against spiders. They’re cool.”

“Sure are.”

He leans back and looks around; tilts his body to examine the corners of the room. “Does his have any...webs, here?”

“Not any that I know of.”

“Shame. Would’ve been cool.” He says as if he were judging someone’s interior decoration. 

“Sure would.”

Silence again.

—

Charlie, in the end, becomes only the first of the two Incidents.

The day Jon comes in; awkward and spiky and unsure, his bedstraw hawk moth buzzing by his head, sometimes settling in his hair like a fashionable hairpin. 

Tim makes friends with him near immediately, which Sasha learns is not a thing he does with everybody; he barely ever talked to Mary and his conversations with Theresa had about as much depth as a flat plate. 

Jon passes the metaphorical test when he surprises Tim back by not only immediately knowing what Balthazar is, but also reacting with more sheer _excitement_ than shock. Sasha, with a knowing smile, watches Jon’s prickly exterior slide off as he and Tim go back and forth about the exciting world of millipedes that she gets fairly quickly lost in.

He doesn’t react quite as well to Martin’s.

At least, he has the courtesy to not immediately reach for an anti-insect weapon when he spots the small spider resting on Martin’s book.

He still yells, a loud bitten-off shriek as he recoils back from where he’d been most likely dissociating and staring at the desk, and Sasha, talking to Tim, jumps and notices Balthazar curling up to a tight ball on reflex.

Martin panics the most, more apologetic than anything else, and only then does Sasha catch his daemon’s name in the dam-break of words. Meridian. Huh.

“Jon, c’mon,” Tim calls, displeased and mad on Martin’s behalf, but Jon already all but runs to his own desk with an expression that sways between apologetic and utterly mortified.

“It’s okay.” Martin says quickly, Meridian already out of sight.

“No, it’s not!” Tim turns to protest.

Jon, eyes wide, rifles through his files at a speed at which he must not absorb a single word as Rigel flies in circles around his head.

“Seriously, it’s fine.” Martin’s face goes from shocked and pale to a deep red, the tone of his voice screaming _Drop it._

Tim seems to catch on, leaving the room to drown in uncomfortable silence that the rustling of paper doesn’t help.

Jon clears his throat when the tide of stuck emotion in the air somewhat subsides. Hesitantly offers a question like an olive branch. “What’s his name? I’m sorry I didn’t...” he exhales, eyes darting between his desk and Martin, “catch it.”

“It’s okay,” comes the reply, all too quickly, “it’s— he’s Meridian.”

“Like the circle between the celestial poles?”

Martin leans back, blinking. “Yeah.”

Upon hearing ‘Meridian’, Sasha’s brain definitely doesn’t go to celestial poles first, so she assumes that Jon must’ve been an astronomy nerd. Maybe still is. Who knows. The name ‘Rigel’ only strengthens the theory.

She pretends not to notice the careful, small smile that Martin wears on his face for the rest of the day.

—

It all starts going wrong when they transfer to the archives.

Sasha spends days locked in a battle of emailing back and forth between upper management and Jon before she can even take the offer, because someone in the upper management just remembered file safety and decided to be a prick about it, including a day-long debacle about aquarium funds. It doesn’t help her already sour mood from losing the Head Archivist position and just makes her bitter. She thanks G-d that most people cannot recognize the emotions of fish, as Arumis mashes herself into corners with her fins raised like sails of oceanic sailboats.

Much, much later, she meets a monster that turns the stripes on Arumis’ dorsal fin into fractals. 

Martin goes missing for two weeks hunted by a worm-hive and when he comes back, he starts living in the cramped space of the Archives as if it was a normal thing that could happen on a normal job that didn’t involve monsters. Meridian starts making webs.

A monster comes into the Archives, and she almost dies.

—

The second gift of luck from the universe she ever received becomes the fact that when faced with the choice to either keep running with both Arumis and a tape recorder in her hands or dropping either to open the door to Artefact storage, she chooses the first option.

It does get her mauled by worms; in the end barely walking, dragging her unresponsive body forward with nothing but sheer will with the tank pressed to her chest; but she makes it out, and she saves them, and Martin finds a dead body and it all goes to hell anyway.

She doesn’t want to be paranoid, but the leave they’re semi-forced to take gives her enough time to overthink and even more time to subtly go through everyone’s personal information in the meantime, just to be sure, just to know, to see if—

One of the characteristics of people with fish daemons that is neither a misconception nor a proven fact, but a strong theory, is curiosity. 

She knows it stems from the fact that people measure the happiness of fish by the ‘level’ of curiosity they express towards their environment, but on a visceral level — when she goes into spirals sitting at her laptop at early hours of the morning with the only other source of light being Arumis’ tank and engaging in quiet conversations filled with theories — she knows that it applies to her. She’s known, actually, for a while, as the fractals on Arumis’ fin show.

She needs to see. To find out what happened. 

To know what is going on.

And unlike Jon — who struggles like a moth repeatedly slamming into a light he cannot comprehend in an endless and chaotic backbreaking effort that he feels is bound to pay off if he just repeats it the _right_ way — she can actually hide it.

She’s been hiding her origins for years now. 

—

The only person in the Archives who knows where she comes from is Martin, of all of them.

(Such a ridiculous thing, she thinks, whenever she looks back at it. That one evening she stayed late at work and thought nobody remained here but her; so when she dropped a (wooden, mind you) box on the foot of her left leg, what came out was no nice, cutting English “fuck!” or “shit!”, rather a whole slew of angry Slavic yelling (“ _Do prdele práce já se s tím srát nebudu_ —“ that sort of thing) that nicely went with the rhythm of her jumping to try to lessen the pain. 

Unfortunately for her, Martin was, in fact, within earshot. 

_Fortunately_ , on the other hand, he replied in Polish; and thus began their strange, hidden and unbeatable solidarity.)

Tim knows that she moved to England but she never quite got to telling him precisely from _where_ ; not ashamed as much as simply not wanting to deal with it and knowing there’s not much to deal with in the first place. It’s perfectly normal now, to decide to move from Central Europe to England. Even if her mum and her grandparents and elders around her reminisced about the time when they were lucky to get close to the borders and not be shot on sight.

She wanted to tell him, of course, but what they had ended too little and too soon. Because she hadn't _felt_ it, not even with him. That magical feeling of romance that people around her seemed to experience and that she had to endure each year at Christmas; alone and channel-hopping on the shitty tv in her flat, begging the time to go faster, eventually just settling for unforgiving critique where Arumis tended to make most of the calls anyway.

She talked with Jon about it, in one of the most open conversations she (and he, if she’s judging right) ever had. Whatever they had, however, shatters with Prentiss.

She promises to herself that if the time arises, she will fix it. That she’ll endure it.

She may not trust any of them right now, but at the end of the day, they’re the only ones she has.

Jon indirectly accuses her of murder over that, however. She almost makes an in-poor-taste sarcastic joke about being a suave secret agent of the KGB all along but doesn’t, just thinks of it as she stumbles over her words under his glare and thinks _Maybe he’s just pretending to be bad at lying. Maybe he’s the one._

She doesn’t take it further after the cat runs out of the bag and Jon all but trips over it, apologizing so quickly she almost doesn't catch it over the loudness of her own heartbeat, almost as quick as Arumis’ own. 

—

When she goes through Tim’s search history as she does for all of them like her twisted version of the morning mail, she finds articles upon articles about daemon separation therapy and something in her sinks. Curls up in a miserable shape around the knot in her chest and chokes her heart, as Arumis buries herself out of sight in that silly way of hers that she thinks will save her.

She realizes she hasn’t seen Balthazar in a while.

Realizes Tim noting with discomfort while pulling at his bandages, when they still felt safe enough to talk, how he couldn’t bear the sight of him. Too much like a worm.

She curls up and sits that way, staring at the shining screen, for a very long time. 

—

Tim pushes for an intervention, which she declines for a reason she can’t recall, other than maybe that she hates Elias more than she’s afraid of anything Jon might do. More terrifying, she thinks, is what Jon might do to himself.

His lie turns out to be weaker than spring ice on puddles.

Jon sends them home. None of them go.

Martin and Tim disappear into the hellish hallways of the illogical and abstract, but the door shuts in front of Sasha’s face. 

She notices the new monster (with Mary’s voice, for some reason, and a jackal for a daemon that cackles and cackles) so she calls out to Jon and tries her frankly-terrible best to follow his voice.

Instead, she wanders far, far further than it should be possible to go, clutching Arumis’ two-liter tank to her chest like the most important thing she has ever had and will ever have, like she’s done whenever she felt scared since the day her own soul limited her choices.

She knows — has known for all her life as it was the only reason she made it this far — that one of the undeniably true qualities about people with daemons that settle as plecos will always be endurance.

She runs, and she tries whatever tricks she has up her sleeves against the wicked, endless hallways. She runs, and stumbles, and crawls, certain that she will never find a way out again.

Sasha finds a building in the center of it all, and in it, she finds a body.

And the pieces fall into place just a tad too soon and too late.

—

When she makes it out, Tim shakes with rage and Martin curses, pale and trembling as Meridian presses himself as close as he possibly can to his throat, and the dead, beaten corpse of Jurgen Leitner lies slumped over the desk in Jon’s office faintly coated with still-shining dust that mixed with blood.

And Sasha is so, _so sick_ of dead fucking bodies.

—

Jon disappears, and somehow, she thinks she ought to take his place.

She doesn’t get the full truth, but a part of it regardless, as she keeps silent and searches obsessively for any indication that her theories might be true. That her interpretation of what she saw might be anywhere close to the truth.  
She obsesses over finding proof because then, she doesn’t have to think about the implications all that hard. About what the truth truly _means._

Melanie joins them in their train to misery town; Sasha remembers her, of course, from their conversation about haunted pubs, the way her presence and her horse fill every room she comes in, the way she holds her confidence like the sword of a knight. 

What Sasha doesn’t remember is the amount of rage that Melanie has locked within her now imploding like the beginning of a supernova. It eats at their friendship as well as Melanie herself, but Sasha has barely enough stability of her own to give too much of it away.

Martin records statements to fill in for Jon and she does too, and it doesn’t take long to notice how they seem to take a lot of him, much more than her. 

How they seem to make her feel better in a twisted way she can’t quite recognize. 

They talk about it in late hours in the evening; quiet conversations, the problems and anxieties they had both multiplying, leaving the old ones to fall away like a tower crumbling under the weight of the sky. She can feel his dark secrets in the way he stands and like an undertone of his words and she knows he can feel hers too. They talk only in English, and neither of them knows why not doing so terrifies them so much.

(“I love him,” says Martin, like a revelation and a solid truth at the same time, like an epiphany that shatters his world as much as like an everyday fact; the sun rises and sets, grass is green and Martin loves Jon.

And she nods and all she can give him is vague and quiet encouragement that she wishes Jon will too. 

He gives her a look with more sadness in it than she thinks love should have, but he smiles all the same.)

Tim starts showing up angry and miserable at default, and no amount of reassurance or sarcasm can make it better; as her secrets and the image of the eye-less body burn in Sasha’s mind and her throat and all she really wants to ask _Where is Balt, Tim?_

Something chips at her too, she thinks, clicking off the tape recorders and heading out, feeling something thrum behind her eyes in the rhythm of Arumis’ heartbeat.

Something hungry and vast and cruel.

She starts dreaming of eyes. 

—

Basira and her have butted heads before; Arumis tense and straight like a cord in the tank that she never puts down at this point and Basira’s daemon, Talib, a red kite with a powerful silent presence, staring her down.

It changes, as Basira signs the contract under Elias’ amused scrutiny as whoever the _hell_ her partner is stands in the room with the presence of a wild animal and a hyena as a daemon to show for it.

It changes because Sasha still tries her best to be kind to the ones who are stuck in this fucking place as much as her.

Basira brings Jon back and offers another helping hand, and Sasha considers and reconsiders as she watches the pragmatic, careful way how she operates, and her brain screams back and forth, indecisive whether her yearning for an ally should be ignored or fulfilled.

Jon comes back broken and shredded and then disappears for a month while nobody notices but Sasha, as Sasha _knows_ from some corner of her mind as dark as a lake at night. He spirals in a way that makes her feel powerless and trapped in return. 

They all do.

She can only watch as Tim either lashes out in a way he hasn’t before or spends hours so silent she doesn’t notice him, and as Martin makes himself into a person she wouldn’t hesitate handing a knife to, and Melanie’s eyes become redder than she thinks is normal. It’s chaos, and Sasha makes a decision.

She tells Basira, Arumis helping to fill the cracks; in the darkness of the tunnels where she’d started to spend more time than in the building they crawl under.

Basira nods, says: “Alright,” and Sasha has no regrets when she follows with: “What do we do?”

—

She stays behind through the Unknowing, and as Martin prepares to burn statements, she finds her way into what she now knows is the Panopticon.

She brings a knife with her and her hand keeps sliding to the hilt as she scours the place, looking in the cells and only then daring to step foot on the platform in the very center.

She recognizes the man now, from descriptions and from the tape she finds on the _Magnus tunnels deep dive: number Who the hell even knows._ The tape with Gertrude’s voice, and her murder, and the secret of the man who held the gun.

She knew since she saw the body; saw something like incorporeal strings running from Elias to here on her mental map of connections, even before she had proof. She didn’t think anything weird of it, before, when she realized a connection between two people seemingly at random. She thought those were just epiphanies or her brain putting together clues like jigsaw puzzles.

She didn’t think anything weird of it until it came to him.

Next to the body of Jonah Magnus in the center of the panopticon lies a seemingly dead bird; an owl with claws nearly the length of Sasha's fingers and beautiful wings unmoving on the ground, as its body doesn’t even twitch when she pokes it with a pen.

It had been there before. The body doesn’t rot, and she doesn’t need some freaky eldritch powers to connect the tapes and the body and the dead-looking daemon with Elias’ lack thereof.

“Sasha!” 

She freezes, and turns, and meets Jonah Magnus’ eyes in Elias Bouchard’s body.

Her mind searches for a gun on him but finds none, and grimly reminds her that the man coming to her with a nonchalant gait but everything else about him filled to the brim with cold rage needs no gun to murder.

And plecos might be durable, but a fish out of water is bound to die regardless.

She steps back from the platform and he moves to meet her, stands just too close to be looming and just far enough to make her fear him coming closer.

She can see the scars at his eyelids and the edges of his eyes; doesn’t know how she hadn’t noticed them before.

“Aren’t you an annoying _pest._ ” He all but snarls through gritted teeth like a monument to homicidal rage.

She doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t.

Just moves a step to the left; the Panopticon has one entry, and whatever remains of Jonah Magnus blocks it like a ravenous sphynx hiding in a suit.

He mirrors her movement with a sneer. “You think I’d let you run?”

He brings his hands to his sides from where he’d been holding them together behind his back, unclenched and all the more dangerous as he stretches his fingers in one practiced motion and begins to roll his sleeves.

“No, not this time.”

The fear in her spikes hot and scalding like acid. “So you’ll kill me?” She scoffs. Her voice wavers.

“I’ll do what I should’ve done ages ago.”

He pulls out the gun.

It’s a sleek thing, terribly expensive; white pearl handle and a motif of eyes and fog engraved into the silvery metal. He makes sure she sees it, watching with a cruel grin as her eyes trail its slow movement, glued to the weapon; before he points it at her head.

“Where should I shoot, hm?”

He has all the time and he knows it, as her own mind struggles to find some way to stay alive. Any way.

“Head?” He makes a little circle with his wrist before his aim settles and falls between her eyes. “You’ve always been so sharp, would it hurt the most?”

“Heart?” His hand lowers, and her hands twitch. “To see how it feels to die alone?”

“Stomach?” Even lower. “You know how long you can spend bleeding out, don’t you?”

His smile spreads to show his teeth.

“Or her?” 

The gun settles on the tank in Sasha’s hand.

She freezes.

“You’d take a shot anywhere if it meant she won’t feel it as much, wouldn’t you? Obviously, she’d feel it. But it wouldn’t be _her_ pain.”

He takes a step closer and she doesn’t move, can’t; frozen like a deer in the headlights.

“You’ve always been so guarded. Ditched your only parent in another country as soon as you could. No other family, no relationships. Putting up walls until you couldn’t tell whether it was her or you, who was locked in a glass tank unable to leave.”

His eyes, blue and cold like arctic ice, shine with a calm ferocity she’s never seen before.

She’s crying; the tears sliding down even as she makes no sound.

“She’s the only thing you have in your miserable excuse for a life.” 

The safety clicks off with a sound that reverberates through her entire being and echoes in the Panopticon. She flinches.

“ _Too bad._ ”

She doesn’t know what she’s thinking, why she’s doing anything she’s doing when something snaps in her mind as Jonah’s finger itches closer to the trigger and begins to pull. 

She surges forward.

The gunshot goes off.

The sound sinks like knives into her mind and she doesn't know which comes first; it or the horror when the echo of it splinters into the shattering of glass. She screams with it, like to prove that she’s alive.

He shoots again, but she grabs his hand and digs her nails into his skin. The bullet ricochets off in the distance.

As she claws the gun out of his grip with a ferocity not unlike a wild animal’s fueled by desperation and terror as well as rage, she realizes that she can’t breathe.

But it doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.

The gun slides on the floor with a skittering sound.

She feels blood on her fingertips, hot and thick. Doesn’t know whose. Doesn’t care.

When Elias all but kicks her off of him and she feels something in her break, she realizes she forgot about the knife.

She scrambles to stand, tasting copper on her tongue and between her teeth, and as soon as she does, the floor comes to meet her again.

This time, something keeps her from standing.

All she makes out is a whimpering, miserable whine against the floor as she tries and fails to make her limbs cooperate, but something is wrong and it makes the gravity seem like a force she can never hope the win against, like chains keeping her down, as if something cut off all the strings that kept her standing.

Jonah Magnus, who she finds when she manages to tilt her head with as much effort as climbing a mountain takes, laughs.

Arumis writhes in his grip.

He’s touching her. He shouldn’t. He can’t. He can’t. _He can’t._

He does anyway.

And she can’t make him stop.

She tries to voice it, but the terrified silence of her mind stole her chords to play Requiem, and even then, she can’t _breathe._

His smile is something uncontained and hungry, full of teeth that she thinks should be sharper, when he squeezes tighter and watches Sasha struggle to scream.

His eyes fucking _shine._

“Well, well, well, what do we have here.” He gloats, voice unhinged and high; blood staining his ruined clothes, seeping into the dark grey and turning it maroon.

The pressure around her body crushes her further when she twitches and slowly, too slowly, agony and suffocation or not, begins to crawl, eyes glued to Arumis.

He’s right, she knows, about her being the only thing Sasha has. And as something hungry awakens and roars inside her, she knows that she won’t let him take Arumis from her.

Her muscles won’t pull but she makes them anyway, uncoordinated and weak like a worm. It will have to do. It has to do.

Jonah’s fingers slip on Arumis’ tail when he moves and she falls to the ground with a wet _splat_ , followed by Sasha’s cry as the crash ignites her left side.

“Slippery little—“ His voice spews hate as he kneels and slams his hand on top of Arumis.

Sasha lays one hand after another. Wedges her elbow under herself and starts to rise even as her lungs fail to take in air and her body threatens to crumble.

Reaches for the knife.

Satisfied with how he positioned his prey, Jonah stands and raises his foot, eyes alight with a fire that Sasha wants to choke out of him, and no, no, that just won’t do.

Something in her breaks and crashes like a tidal wave splintering against a cliff and it’s with that force of the ocean; with the force of sharp-toothed aquatic beasts that have never seen the sun that the darkest waters hide within; that she stands on shaky legs and pulls out the knife with trembling hands wet with blood.

And falls, the blade pointed against him, its tip steady as the horizon line.

Because she knows where to point it.

She lands on top of him and she wants to vomit as her skin comes into contact with his where he tried to grip her hands, but the handle digs into her side and there’s a wet sound of iron slicing through meat.

He screams. Unguarded and surprised and angry and in pain.

And everything in her that’s not fear and misery; that’s darker and new and ancient; stares at him with all the glassy eyes of carnivorous fish and thinks _Good, good, now scream louder._

She twists the knife and the sound of her breathless laughter merges with his cry.

She drags it out and raises it to her chest like something holy as she grits her teeth and a growl escapes instead of words. 

His eyes, for once, are the ones wide in fear.

She lifts it above her head and wants to say _Do you want the eyes first? The heart? The lungs?_ But doesn’t have the air or the need for a parody.

Her soul sings with the beat of her heart a ruthless song, and her whole body shakes and she stares down at him and meets his eyes again, seeing her reflection.

Wide eyes, bared bloodied teeth in a smile of her own.

Her chest spasms and the melody like the tide of waves sings a choir of _Cut him apart and take his limbs and eyes and skin and bury them deep in the forest where no one will find him and let him learn how it feels to beg_ and the power of it fills her veins and she knows the eyes will go first; then—

She hears Arumis plead.

Not any words, none she can hear, but a quiet voice as she realizes just how silent the room is but for her dry heaving and Elias’ weak attempts to compose himself.

The warm blood drips from the knife and runs down her hands and coats them with the color of crushed berries.

Arumis pleas and cries and Sasha’s mind faces the dilemma of whether to listen to her power or her soul, the game had already begun and she can’t leave and the motion has to be finished, the open jaws _have_ to snap—

She brings the knife down. Elias gasps as it grazes a cut down the side of his neck.

She gives him no words, no warnings, as she grabs the hilt and takes it with her, diving for where her soul lies bleeding.

She’s so small, as Sasha picks her up from the floor and cradles her in her hands. Steps away from where Jonah lies, staring.

She doesn’t think about it twice, because she lost enough time already; as she comes back to herself from the depth of the ocean in her mind and, stumbling and gasping, begins to run.

The corridors seem to go on for hours but she opens her mind and lets it lead her with the connections she has, lets it lead her back to the Archives, back to Martin and Melanie, and it almost makes her laugh.

She came into the Panopticon hoping that Martin’s distraction would buy her time.

Turns out she bought it for them.

After dozens of turns and Arumis’ movements becoming slower and weaker, she trips and falls in the hallway of the Archives; realizing with a start that she can’t move anymore. Her body gave up. The run was its last hurrah, and now that she lies on the cold wooden ground with faint marks from worms, it’s over.

She thinks she wants to call; for Martin, for Melanie, for anybody; but what comes out of her is nothing but a wet choking gasp, and another, and another, as the adrenaline departs and the pain sinks in and her body reminds itself that she’s supposed to be dying.

She digs her bloodied fingers into the floor, but all it does it taint it with red.

Arumis goes limp.

 _Not like this_ , Sasha thinks, _no, not after everything._

She tries calling out one last time, but the croak breaking into the whisper reaches only her own ears.

And as darkness takes Arumis, it takes her too.

-

She wakes up feeling like—well, crap.

“Sasha?”

With a shock comes the realization that she can breathe.

It feels like the greatest thing in her life, and it’s immediately stolen when she breaks into a coughing fit.

“Sasha!”

Martin’s voice, careful and so, so _scared._

She opens her eyes and the first thing she sees is, well, Martin, and she has to track his arms with her eyes to notice one of his hands resting on her shoulder.

When she speaks, she sounds as if she hasn’t said a word in a million years. “Hey.”

On a bit of introspection, she realizes she feels weak, miserably so. Strings cut, muscles pulled but not quite working, the wounds on her pulsing piercing pain through her entirety.

Her hands are empty.

She jerks, haziness replaced by terror, and pulls herself off of the floor with the sheer force of will; starts searching for Arumis because if Sasha is awake than Arumis has to be as well but where—

“Sasha, calm down,” Martin says as he helps her not fall on her face. 

“Where—“ she croaks the word that she meant to scream when she notices.

One of Martin’s hands is wet to the wrist, skin pruned and pale.

She stares at him as they stand; mashed against each other from Martin’s effort not to drop her on the floor.

“She’s okay. She—she is.” Martin says and she notices the half-dried tear-tracks on his face.

He nods to something behind Sasha and she follows his gaze to the aquarium she almost forgot was there.

Arumis lies there, obviously not okay and mashed half under a rock, but breathing. Alive.

Sasha’s legs give out as she bursts into tears.

They kneel on the floor and Martin hugs her, whispers up a constant stream of words that Sasha doesn’t listen to. 

When she does, he tells her about how he’s sorry, how he should’ve asked or— or something, when he picked Arumis from where she lay in Sasha’s limp hand and held her in the current of the filter like how he once saw in a video talking about resuscitating fish.

And she hugs him and tells him, simply, “You saved my fucking life, Martin. You saved her. Thank you.”

He nods with an: “Of course” and she notes two truths in her life that she must’ve already known but never quite realized; that she has more allies than just one, and that Martin is one of the bravest men she knows.

—

Tim doesn’t die, Daisy vanishes, Basira logics herself out of a nightmare ritual and Jon lies unresponsive in a medically impossible coma on a hospital bed.

She decides that any result in which Jonah goes away is better than anything they’ve gotten before, and then he does; walking a bit stiffly, she notes with pride. A man named Peter replaces him, and Martin gets quieter and quieter no matter how much she talks to him.

So she goes to Tim; angry and defeated and afloat without the single purpose he had in his life for years.

She sits in the uncomfortable hospital chair, trying not to think about the one Martin spends days in, in a different room with a different person, and asks about Balthazar whilst avoiding Tim’s eyes.

She braces for the answer, a coinflip in her mind; because one possible way separation therapy works is through distance, and another though the complete removal of a daemon. Both a controversial practice, one of them much less terrifying, much less making her beg for the coin to not fall to it.

When he explains, slowly and with difficulty like dragging feet through water, the coin falls and Sasha cries, but not from misery. She hugs him as close as she can and says “Never leave him behind again, promise me. Never.”

He sends her to his flat and she cries the whole journey on public transit.

One girl gives her a look of support accompanied with a quick, shy smile, and she decides to remember the stranger’s face; to remember the world out there where people are kind. The world they’re trying to save.

She smiles back.

—

Not touching Balthazar while getting him in the bag proves to be a challenge, as the millipede refuses to move from where he’s tangled into a tight ball on a pillow on the nightstand next to Tim’s bed. 

Sasha’s heart aches when she notices how the place has changed; from a somewhat clean living place of a researcher with comfortable, inviting furniture and a bookcase organized by topic, to a dusty sort of mess that the sun doesn’t touch through the pulled curtains.

But Balthazar lay there as something sacred, like a monument to shaken hope of endurance.

She carries him like a fragile gem that might shatter and break if she just shakes it too much and she brings him to Tim. Watches as he gently runs his hand over the black exoskeleton interrupted by scars.

“After Prentiss, he—“ Tim begins, and his voice fails but he tries again because he’s nothing if not stubborn to finish what he had already begun, “he curled up and then wouldn’t loosen and I. I was so scared, too scared, that I couldn’t protect him anymore.”

She nods. Her hands tighten on the tank she’s holding. 

The scars on Arumis’ body and their mirrored brethren on hers ache.

Tim closes his eyes. “But mostly I was afraid of what it meant, because...they’re a representation of what we are. Of what we feel, whether we want it or not. And whenever I looked at him, or felt him, or— or touched him, I got. I got scared. And at a certain point, I just couldn’t handle it anymore.”

His hand stops. Balthazar doesn’t move.

“Tim, I’m…” what should she say? What can she even say? That she’s sorry? 

What difference does it make anyway, with Tim being afraid of his own soul yet stuck with it forever?

“I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t reply, and the determination with which she wanted to tell him again _Never leave him because one day you might realize he’s the only thing you have and it may be too late_ leaves her like rain clearing from the streets.

“Not your fault. There’s nothing you can do.”

It hurts, even if she knows it wasn’t meant to.

But Tim doesn’t leave Balt behind again and for all her hubris she calls it a victory. 

A world can be fought for in tiny steps.

—

She realizes that something changed as the time passes and the net in her mind, a branching thing that before felt like a box of angel hair pasta spilled on the floor in the shape of vague connections, becomes clearer; easier to navigate.

She knows who Jonah is, now, sees the string stretched between him and the Panopticon flare like a laser to the eye whenever she thinks about him; but she doesn’t know his plans and the entity that had claimed her refuses to give.

So, she searches. Runs along the wires pulled taut like the strings of an intricate instrument. 

She thinks it may resemble how a fish sees a world in the darkest of waters; not like facts, but like currents and markers of location assembled into a web of knowledge between which they move. A long, winding process; culture of the animals that weren’t thought to have any not so long ago. It reminds her of spiders.

She searches for clues and for what Jonah’s plan might be and tries her hardest to trust Martin.

Spiders, among other things, broadly tend to mean ‘playing the long game’; they build their webs to both help themselves think as well as to accomplish their plans and then wait and see. 

And she really hopes that’s what he’s doing, the lines in her map that lead to him shrouded in fog.

—

Jon wakes up, and Rigel doesn’t.

—

She almost finds Georgie’s email just to send her one with a blank subject and a ‘What the fuck’ in its body and then picks a fight with Melanie instead of doing so.

And Jon sits in his office, distracting himself or perhaps trying to prove something to them as he rants about all his pens missing, and when Sasha comes back from her shouting match her eyes fall to Jon’s hands, which haven’t stopped shaking.

Because Rigel looks dead, and Jon is alive, and it goes against the rules of reality in a way that wedges a sword between all of them like a cruel reminder that they didn’t need to receive. That Jon of all of them needed the least.

And her mind goes to the dead bird in the Panopticon, and goes to it again and again regardless of what she tries to do like a twisted version of a pink elephant until her dreams have her standing in the center of the panopticon herself; staring at cells and beyond them at the wide branching rivers of connection like the Yggrasil holding the world together and going back and forth like neurons in the brain, and feathers and blood cover her hands.

She smiles, in those dreams, wide and powerful and knowing.

And her glassy eyes shine with gold.

Sometimes, she wakes and Arumis doesn’t until hours and hours later, but the outside world doesn’t notice. Never notices. The state of fish for most people ranges from dead to okay with nothing in-between, where dead means upside down and bloated, and okay means anything but.

Sasha is a coward and doesn’t tell them.

Instead, she watches Jon cradle his unresponsive soul so gently, so softly, like a feather that might fall and rip with the slightest of movements, and she wants to break something and rip Elias to shreds when Jon stares at Rigel with wet, uncomprehending eyes full of quiet despair and defeat. 

She thinks _No, no, this is unfair. This shouldn’t be happening. He doesn’t deserve it_ but doesn’t know how to fix it. 

Doesn’t think she can, and the sources remain indecisive in the world so full of failures.

“I’m a monster, aren’t I?” Jon mutters, dark depthless eyes aimed at the floor, and Sasha has nothing to say.

—

It takes her an embarrassingly long time to realize that the several lines of pain and animosity that run from Jon to miscellaneous avatars like the petals of a flower bear a more than slight significance. To notice the pull that goes between Jonah and him.

All of the staff in the Archives are tied to him like dogs on a chain not allowed to bite but the line between Jonah and Jon specifically shines bright and painful, a sunray amplified through a magnifying glass.

She does the math. She stabs the pencil through the paper as a harsh, Slavic curse slips from between her teeth.

Not exactly, not yet; but enough to see the tie between Lukas and Jonah and question just what it means. 

She writes it down, the theories that come into her head, as she explains them to Arumis. Stands from the table so abruptly the chair almost falls, when she’s done.

Basira went away, she knows, to another of her expeditions. A double-edged sword of seeing what Elias knows and being inevitably led astray by him when all Sasha could offer her was theories, Melanie her knife and Jon the look in his sad, tired, softly glowing eyes.

But Jon rarely leaves.

When she steps into the hallway, however, she meets eyes with an unfamiliar man.

Even with a pressed suit; a bit too big on him, if she’s honest; he smells faintly of sea salt and nothing else.

“There you are.” A pleasant voice, entirely devoid of personality like a pre-recorded message.

She knows who he is, even before the ocean in her head allows another ray to trickle in and fill in the gaps and make new connections, as the fog clears.

“What—“

“Allow me to introduce myself; I’m Peter Lukas! Surely you’ve heard of me.” He smiles and his eyes remain cold and grey like the sky before a storm at sea. “Not that it matters much, now.”

She wants to repeat the same question, braces herself for a fight, for a sprint, for _something—_

He waves a hand and it falls from her mind and her tongue. The air gets cold, colder than it should be, and she no longer recalls what she was in such a rush to do.

She shivers, looks at her hands with disbelief as if she were seeing them for the first time. 

The fog rolls in. Seeping through the floorboards and curling around Lukas’ shiny oxfords like a trusted dog, before crawling to her.

“What are you—“

His smile widens to an ugly, hungry thing. “Now, now; don’t be afraid. It won’t hurt. Much.”

It seeps into her clothes and skin and into her lungs until she can’t recall how being warm felt.

“I’m just doing what has to be done.”

“Why?” She chokes it out and it comes out with fog seeping from her mouth into the air. Her glasses fog over; tiny frost flowers growing from the edges when she tries to wipe them clean.

She holds Arumis close ever as their connection dwindles like a candle flame; the Lonely takes over, and she knows how it works, just not yet in the supernatural way. 

“Because, well, Elias isn’t here to do it himself, is he?” He tilts his head, and the grey of his eyes swallows his pupils as the fog like vines of roses devours the walls. 

She tries to step back and can’t; then, at least, she clenches her teeth to keep them from chattering. 

He steps forward, and his eyes disappear into a white void of fog that cracks the edges of where they used to stare at her with faux nonchalance. 

“And you are alone, right now, aren’t you? Where are your _coworkers_ , Sasha?”

She doesn’t know. She can’t answer.

He leans forward; his hands clasped together behind his back and he’s tall, taller than even Tim, and she wants to back away but has nowhere and everywhere to as the fog never ends. It ate the floor and walls and ceiling and now rises from the bottom like an ocean slowly filling a sinking ship that she’s bound to drown in.

“I’m doing you a favor, you know? You won’t have to see what comes next! You won’t ever have to deal with anything threatening your life, or your dear daemon,” he spits the word out with disgust, “or fear losing anything meaningful to you, because, well, you won’t _have_ anything left.”

She can’t see her knees anymore. It rises further, faster, eating more of her until she can’t feel her legs anymore. Running through her bloodstream and making the world around her hazy and grey. She’s tired, she realizes. She could lie down and let the fog take her. 

It would be so much easier than trying to fight.

In the second of distraction, it swallows Arumis, and something inside Sasha curls up in a tight ball and dies.

She can’t see Peter anymore, as his clothing and skin gradually fade into the fog as well as become fog themselves, but she feels him watch. “Goodnight, James.”

Then he is gone as well and Sasha stands on an empty beach alone.

The irony is, she’s never been to the ocean before.

—

She walks in the quiet; soft steps she can’t hear made by feet she doesn’t feel, which still somehow propel her forward. It’s quiet. Nothing hurts.

She can’t remember why she ended up here. 

She walks, and she thinks, and she doesn’t know where she’s going or why but something keeps her from stopping.

The ocean hums with the soft wind that propels waves to form; off-color and faded and white. She knows it doesn’t exist, not really, nothing here is real; it reminds her of the cliche romantic scenes in shitty movies the plot of which could’ve been torn from any red library novel and nobody would’ve noticed; in how surreal it is, how bland.

The landscape resembles a wall of white and grey more than any plausible location, the specks of ground that the fog uncovers ashy like gunpowder. The ocean mirrors the sky in its vast whiteness, in its passive nothingness.

This is nothing and that nothing is white, unlike darkness.

It feels worse. Sterile. Unnatural.

She looks down on her feet and can’t see them properly, but even then she feels like they don’t belong to her. As if something else is making her own body move, having tied her consciousness to it like a balloon filled with helium.

She’s holding something. Only vaguely registering the surprising weight of the object; a rectangular tank where her daemon resides, but it all seems too distant. She can feel no connection there. Her key to the matrix lost and forgotten, washed away by the tides.

She keeps walking anyway.

What did he say, Peter was his name?

She remembers him using her last name, the one she changed in uni. She simply hated the questions that came with the name she previously had, her mother’s, her father’s; a name that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary in the country she left but stood out like a pole blocking the middle of the street to any professor who tried to say it aloud.

It made sense to change it. Even as her mother begged her not to. 

How long has it been since they last talked? Too long, so long Sasha can’t recall what her mother sounded like. Years that might as well be decades.

She’s never been close to her family. Now, standing in the fog. Feeling it blur the lines of her, she can't even recall her mother’s daemon or her smile.

Just her anger and begging and remarks that hurt more than they ever hit their target, and above all crushing disappointment; the look in her dark eyes whenever Sasha messed up.

It’s better like this. It is. 

It still hurt, from the man’s mouth.

A proof of how fake everything around her was, how guarded, how much people didn’t know about her because she didn’t want to share.

_Where are your coworkers, Sasha?_

Just coworkers, nothing more. Maybe allies, if she risks, but then she remembers Melanie’s sharp knives and words she threw around and her daemon’s ( _What was his name?_ ) incisors snapping near her ears during their argument, and stomping his hooves until there were marks in the wood on the floor until somebody started yelling from the hallway words she couldn’t make out over the noise. The memory makes her stop and close her eyes. Too loud. Too bright; light reflected on the metal of a blade.

The fog uses the brief moment of distraction to stick to her ankles like spider’s webbing strings. She doesn’t feel it, she just knows. 

She recalls Martin; just as lost as her. She thought they could bond over it, but then the color of Martin’s eyes disappeared in murky, dull grey and whatever their conversations had before gotten lost in the tense feeling of intrusion.

She still doesn’t know what his plan is, but it doesn’t involve her. He doesn’t need her. Never did. 

Her resolve wavers like a ship on a sea in a storm.

None of them need her. 

What good did she really do? She was gone, ever since Prentiss. Just stalking them all in secrets and sneaking through the tunnels beneath the institute. Always working alone, until it was too late, and then not even telling all of them; just some random woman and only because she looked as lost as everybody else but as desperate and steady in her resolve to learn as Sasha.

She walks on. It’s the only thing she’s been good at; moving, escaping, enduring. Even when she should’ve stayed.

She needs to find freshwater, yes. That’s why she’s walking. 

Her soul trembles in the small cramped tank and she can’t feel it, a string cut or perhaps just pulled on too much until it lost all its give. 

She won’t ever leave this place: she knew it since the fog dampened the first spike of terror as it swallowed her into its domain.

Might as well set her soul free.

But all she sees is the sea, the horizon full of it, unblemished and unmoving, hiding the borders where the water and fog met.

She’s the only thing intruding on its careful, empty balance. Always an intruder, never belonging.

She searches on.

When her soul begins to speak, it echoes like a gunshot in a graveyard would.

“Sašo, kam chceš jít?” Arumis says weakly and she doesn't understand, the words foreign yet familiar, but carrying no meaning. She doesn’t stop.

It’s painful, hearing another's voice; the whole reality around her looming like a disappointed authority and Sasha almost feels that fear awaken just to cement in the truth that this place belongs to the silent.

She closes her eyes and pushes on.

“Sašo, musíme se vrátit,” it pleads and she only knows it’s pleading, from the tone that with such fear speaks on.

Everything in her, suddenly, painfully, wants to yell, but she can’t, she can’t, she can’t.

She successfully remained silent to a point for decades now. Speaking, yes, but never too seriously, too openly. It’s an art of living like any other, she thought as she found it so much easier to hide things than to reveal them.

There’ve been exceptions, she’s sure, but she can’t remember them; and what can’t be remembered may not even exist, she knows. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it did. But like in Orwell’s 1894 she chose to read for a class so long ago just to prove that she could, history can be shaped by the winner however they like.

And the Lonely wins, here. 

“Sašo, mně je zima.”

She doesn’t have anything that could bring her back; the only thing she has trapped here twice over.

She thinks of her mother, but the only thing that remains in her fogged-over memory is all the fights they had and then the silence when they didn’t talk enough to fight.

“Co se děje?”

She thinks of the terrible reel of her failed romances and the only thing it does is help the cold crawl further up her spine.

She thinks of Tim, then, out of misery prompted by the Lonely more than any desire to repeat the sequence of fuck-ups that brief thing of theirs was. They both fought hard to become friends again after all if it; to will the space between them to carry more of the present than the past, and they never mentioned it again.

She still remembers when he let her touch Balthazar and she refused. She can’t remember why, but she does recall his shock falling into something like disappointment before he could will it away.

But they were friends. She hopes they were at least that, maybe. 

Tim, in the hospital, broken and his anchor to the world cut off when he’d expected it to drag him down to the depths; confessing to her something he’s been hiding for years, just as he had years before. With the same open, fragile look in his eyes as he had when over the cramped coffee table in her flat, he told her about Danny.

As if she was someone who could help him. Who was worthy of that confession, that openness.

“Sašo, já mám strach.”

She slowed down and stopped, at some point.

The fog swirls towards her and rises with a slow glide and she knows that once it washes her over, she’ll be gone like those tricks in fantasy movies where the villain vanishes in a puff of smoke.

She doesn’t want to, something in her realizes. She doesn’t want to die.

The fog falls down from the sky in thick clumps with the delicacy of cut hair and she watches, scaring the thought away.

But she feels a force imploding in her like a neutron star. Like something that matters trying to push into her mind and begging for her attention, begging to be seen like a child forgotten by its mother.

She lets her head hang low, closes her eyes again to the darkness that doesn’t offer solace as the bleached light still gets through. Tries to make it disappear, but she can’t.

She knows the danger hidden in false hopes, in false promises of It’ll be better. She can’t get out of this place and she knows there’s nowhere else to go than to die, to vanish and dissolve into seafoam and smoke and become another addition to the haze that covers the surface of the ocean.

But the harder she thinks, the more it cracks, like a mirror with something hiding behind it, like the foundations of a tower that can’t remain standing anymore.

Her hands clench around the aquarium like she was Atlas and Arumis was her sky and it catches her off-guard how well she can feel it. Not Arumis, not the link between them, but her presence that she’s always had in her life; a tank just too small and too heavy simultaneously, a compromise that ended up being uncomfortable either way, but one that feels real in this world bleached of substance. 

The miniature lake hidden in it, water that she had to throw out at the end of each day and prepare another to keep the tank at her flat cycling, playing Chroma Rush on her phone until the water starts boiling and then sticking it into the coldest corner in her flat to cool down. It’s as clear to her as ever, simple as it is; Sasha curled up on her stool in the cramped kitchen, tapping on the phone as Arumis watches her from the glass she carries her around the flat in.

The outside world mutes as if frozen and her mind spirals further down, like a ship through caves might find an ocean; and she finds it there, hidden in the memory of Arumis’ eyes watching her like she was the only thing in the world.

The memory of another ocean, a darker one, a real one; not like an ocean, actually, more a river deeper than any should be, deep enough to hold the body of the Leviathan with all its crooked teeth, wide and powerful enough to swallow frigates on its cliffs hidden in the inky water, with more branches than even the widest delta ever had. A dark thing with familiar shapes of edges and turns, yet having never been walked in. 

She can almost feel the beat and thrum of the water, and moving shapes of freshwater fish in it searching and searching with their sharp minds and teeth.

Her body turns into a distant thing yet again, unfamiliar with its fingered limbs and smooth skin and lungs taking in air as if it belonged there, and she sees her mind searching for something better suited for the river, better for the Watcher that found her in the Forsaken and demands she return.

Sasha reaches into the tank and Arumis slides into her hand and something breaks and crashes, crumbling down, because she fits into her hand like she’s always belonged there and Sasha never noticed. Lock and key.

When she opens her eyes again, the grey world is grey no more.

Colors that weren’t there before, the world spread into an angle wider than she remembers as if she walked her whole life zoomed into a miserably small field of view and only now could see the world in its glory.

She can’t tell what color the fog is anymore. Or the sea, or the sky that shies away from her in a large circle as if now afraid to touch.

But it is wrong, she knows, as if it was the one truth in her life she knew with utmost clarity.

That this isn’t how the sea looks like. How it’s supposed to feel, being near it.

The river flows onwards without waiting for her as she lets herself be taken as the pathways open again and chase the fog away.

Closes her eyes to the world with the wrong colors and opens them to the one in her mind where they’re clear, where she can learn their names and recognize them, where she stares not into the water but from under its surface and what covers her back is more armor than skin.

The two worlds hang like parallel realities, both them dragging her like binary stars whose system she’s the planet of, stuck in the middle. Nothing moves, and she reaches something calm, feeling one of her bodies take in air as another stretches its gills.

Then, between one breath and the next, Arumis leaves her hand.

But not into water, not into the small cramped nothing she’s been living in that Sasha can now comprehend the nothingness of compared to the river of the Watcher, no.

She leaps into the air as if it was water; as if she was a bird meant to fly. 

When Sasha next opens her eyes, they meet Arumis’ as she idly swims in the open, for the first time truly free.

“We have to leave,” Arumis says, and her eyes brighter, less glassy, adorned with irises closer to a circle than she ever had. 

“How?” Sasha asks and notes how she can see Arumis perfectly as close as she is, even without her glasses; the wrong, pale sea remaining as blurry as before.

“Look for those you have and lead the way,” Arumis replies and her voice carries a strength to it that Sasha never noticed, never cared enough to notice. Like a queen giving the order for war with a steel mind and a strategy.

Her own voice, in comparison, reminds her more of a man speaking to a G-d, reverent, and afraid in quiet awe.

“But we’ve never been close enough.” 

“Just look.” Arumis, with a few precise swishes of her tail, swims around her head like Rigel used to do with Jon and—

That memory hurts until she’s back; armor for skin and the glass walls gone, collapsed and broken where she didn’t even realize she stood on its shards. And she focuses, even as the Watcher in her mind tries to redirect her onward with the flow, to deeper waters where the bigger beasts hide. She sticks herself to the riverbank and _looks._

Looks at Jon, and what they had between each other. How it hurt to see each new scar, how she promised she would be there to bear the next one instead of him; how she never was. The conversations they had, the quiet looks, the touches when either of them were still able to bear the occasional bump or brush of fingers without flinching. The openness with which he showed her Rigel’s curled-up body as if she’d have the answers. His trust, and kindness. His bad jokes that still managed to land. And even if she hadn’t been able to see it for a long time now, his wonder. 

She looks at Tim and shoves aside the images that the weakened fog tries to offer her and goes deeper and deeper still, to the moments where she felt like at Tim’s side they could defeat the world. Where Tim felt, at hers, that the world had a chance to be okay.

She goes for Martin next and Arumis shares with her the memory of his hand, gentle yet steady, that saved them more than the Watcher ever did, and she thinks that’s an easy answer, so simple that the fog can’t for all it’s tricks conceal it behind absence and grey eyes.

Then Melanie; and her sharpness and wit and the moment from which Sasha knew that even she could be kind. Basira and her pragmatism that Sasha learned to admire and although they didn’t know that much about each other, she’d never leave her to deal with everything alone.

“Do you see it?” Arumis asks, her fins relaxed and her eyes blinking at Sasha. Once, twice, thrice.

“I think so.”

“Then lead the way.”

She loves them, that’s the thing; a friendship isn’t an afterthought, but a statement against the power of isolation worth saying.

And that’s enough. 

The fog sneaks out of her way, retreats with an almost terror as Sasha walks forward, Arumis keeping close to her in the air; doing little barrel rolls and turns.

She carries the tank as a precaution anyway. Maybe as a reminder.

At a certain point, many steps later and following the offered direction within the river in her mind, the ocean gains a different hue.

Then, gradually, as a limb gaining feeling again, the world falls into place.

She’s missed the sun, she realizes.

“Miss?”

She flinches hard enough to splash herself with the water in the tank and then jolts again from pain as Arumis falls from the air onto the sand.

She rushes to gather her with shaking hands and clumsily places her back in the tank as reality sinks in with unforgiving clarity. Her whole body trembles and her trousers are drenched and there’s somebody near her, coming closer, after what feels like a _year_ without human contact and the ocean roars loudly enough to deafen her and whenever a seagull shrieks above in the sky, she flinches again.

The woman looks concerned when she finally stops a few feet from her, unsure if she ought to go closer, and Sasha doesn’t blame her for it.

“Are you alright?”

She only barely manages to make the words out for how much her body shakes. “Y-yes.”

She doesn’t know this person, and she’s standing on the side of an unfamiliar beach she’s never been to and that’s when her human mind unhelpfully remarks _Hm, it seems we’re not at the institute anymore._

“Can I just ask, what’s the closest town to here?”

The woman frowns and Sasha almost cringes at how, well, out of it she sounds. How everything she says sounds. 

G-d, what is even her life now.

She looks into the woman’s eyes and for a moment knows instantly how many friends she has, the lines spreading from her and her soul perched in the form of a seagull on her shoulder, and what her relationship with her sons is and how she’s been trying to reach her eldest for years and who she dated in uni and can even see with perfect clarity the last fight the poor woman had with her childhood best friend, and the river keeps on going until—

 _Snap out of it_ , she commands to herself and carefully looks to the woman’s right, just over her shoulder.

“This is Bournemouth,” the woman says and adds, “are you sure you’re alright?” 

Shit.

She looks more than just concerned, now. Suspicious.

 _Please don’t take me to the police or something_ , Sasha thinks and shuffles through the lies in her inner database, determining which one could be the most fitting, putting on her most convincing smile in the process.

Later, sitting on the bus after finding her wallet miraculously undamaged from the whole ordeal, Sasha James cries most of the way back to London. Her hand doesn’t leave Arumis.

People stare, but what’s new. She’s an employee of the Magnus Institute, being watched (and watching too, now, she supposes) is their _thing._ Idly, she wonders if she could make them spill their secrets just by asking like Jon does, but quickly chases away the thought.

In the end, staring at the sun and the sky which has returned to the colors she remembers, she ends up marveling at how much of her life has turned into crying on public transit in one form or another.

-

From her perspective, the little trip southwest through the land of Forsaken took just a few hours of complete misery and world-breaking revelations.

When she arrives at the Institute and a not-quite-unfamiliar and very should-be-dead person opens the door for her and Sasha knows she’s thinking the _exact same thing_ , she throws that estimate out of the window and prepares for the worst.

Months. She’s been there for months, lost to the hellish nothing of fog and fake, bleached sea.

It shocks her at first, but then, well, this might as well happen. 

First off, Daisy is back, and that makes Sasha feel some kind of way she can’t quite untangle other than seeing her and Jon together makes her feel at edge at first. 

But this is a different Daisy; softer, gentler, repentant. A Daisy that thinks twice before touching, whose expression speaks of pain. Whose daemon (Arcturus, Sasha finally learns and wonders if Jon and her ever bonded over stars) rests by her feet and follows her in silence instead of snarling and baring his teeth at anybody who dares to come close.

Second off, Melanie got better; Sasha almost weeps when she greets her with shock and a reverent “You didn’t die,” and thinks _Yes, because I couldn’t leave you all alone._

They know how to leave, and Melanie wants to, and Sasha wants nothing more than to find a way less drastic but promises to help her anyway.

Tim and Basira aren’t present when she returns; apparently running errands together, whatever they might be; but whatever she feels about that, she puts on the backburner.

Because Martin is still gone, and Jon, now, is apparently a monster.

She learns of the intervention and feels dread and confusion as well as rage directed at nobody and maybe the whole world, or maybe, in the clearest corner of her mind, at Jonah through a magnifying glass.

She wants him to burn. G-d, she wants to drown him, to smear him off the world like a fly until all he leaves behind is the trauma he caused.

She regrets nothing more than not sinking that knife into his eyes in the Panopticon.

But it’s not her main concern, no, can’t be.

Because all but one marks are there on Jon, bright and painful and so, so obvious now that she knows what to search for.

She doesn’t wait for Basira, or for Tim, or for Daisy to leave the room; she gathers her thoughts and tells him, top to bottom, what Elias is after. 

She doesn’t know why, not exactly; her rivers of knowledge may be like getting the keys to the Matrix, but accounting for something redacting the relevant information when she needs it. But they know, now, what he’s putting together. What he’s making Jon do.

And Jon; whose daemon lies unresponsive in a small box she brought him, originally meant to hold jewelry but so far it does just fine; he breaks.

Shatters. Done. 

She lets Daisy hold him, content to fuss in the distance unsure and awkward, and then Daisy grits her teeth like a wolf, and Arcturus’ fur stands and she growls “I’ll rip him apart.” 

And she stares at Sasha, her eyes yellow like the heads of wildflowers, and she feels, yet again, _You have many more allies than you ever thought._

It’s not okay, it never is, but she knows, darkly and sweetly like running blood, that the fate which awaits Jonah carries the sharpest of teeth of all.

—

“I’m a monster too,” she says to Jon; softer than she did with Basira (with her it’d been a test, a way of seeing _Will you trust me even now?_ and Basira passed it), less regretful than with Tim.

In the dim light of the late evening, his eyes are darker than the sky in a storm and deeper than the cosmos overhead. He’s starving, and Sasha honestly doesn’t care about dreams.

(Her own are about the river anyway. About the Leviathan in it, that the Watcher wants her to become. That she fears and knows she already has.)

She tells him about the Lonely; all of it, the walking; the epiphany.

In her dreams, he stands on the side of the river, searching for her in the darkest of waters.

—

Melanie leaves. 

Jon calls the ambulance and Sasha jokes with her about the horse statue in the Denver airport, holding her hand like a lifeline and an anchor, before it arrives. Melanie doesn’t laugh, but thanks them both anyway.

—

Something leaves a tape on Jon’s desk and a garden spider sitting on it, steady as a rock.

An oak spider, the name of which Jon and her both know too well.

Meridian doesn’t resist when Jon cups him in his hand, doesn’t even speak nor twitch, just walks over to his hand like a lost ship finally finding a harbor.

—

Basira commands them to run when the thing that is definitely not Mary emerges at, very inconveniently, the same time as the hunters attack.

She yells something like encouragement and a wish of luck at Tim before she does, following Jon into the tunnels.

(Tim wanted to leave, too, but stayed. More work to do; as if they all knew it will either end in weeks or never end at all. A timer counting down. She thinks of the first time she met him and the present, and the word that stays in her mind like gold found in a creek is _determination_ , and she loves him even more than she already did.)

She loses Jon within the first few turns and takes a different route, letting the water rush through her veins and show her the way to the Panopticon.

She comes just before Jon does, just soon enough to see Martin vanish, to see how the devouring fog looks from the outside perspective.

She doesn’t think it over before she’s yelling one last time, calling his name.

Announcing herself to all but him; already too gone, thin smoke swirling against the floor in the place where he stood.

“Sasha.” Jonah growls at the same time that Peter, damn him, mutters “What?”

And adds, like a fool; nowhere near the intimidating figure in the hallway of months ago, or the voice that led the fog to her in the Forsaken like ships to the lighthouse, “You were supposed to be _dead._ ”

“Did you honestly not notice?” Jonah turns to him, all but hissing the question through his teeth even as he already knows the answer. 

Peter just steps back, puzzled, and trying to understand yet failing miserably.

But he’s not the one she’s looking at.

Jonah’s eyes are as bright as when he held Arumis in his crushing grasp as Sasha choked on the floor. 

Even brighter; not angry, but victorious. As if nothing can stop him.

“He knows of your little plan, Jonah,” she steps into the light.

“Oh, does he?” He grins, “Does it matter?”

He lets the pause settle between them the same way acid drips slowly and devours well.

“Do you really think he won’t choose to go after his dear assistant?”

She knows he will. She’ll gladly let him.

“Your plan doesn’t end there, though, does it?” She calls back; stops, leaving a break between them like a flaming bridge.

The knife digs into her side with a soothing pressure where she tucked it in her clothes.

Jonah tilts his head and doesn't answer, and that’s an answer enough.

In the second than follows, a second of one monster staring down another, she makes a reckless decision, one she knows she won’t regret. 

“So, did you come here to finish the job?” Jonah’s smile stretches so sharp she wonders how it doesn’t cut the corners of his mouth.  
“Kill me?” It sounds like mockery.

She won’t, no, not today.

But she’ll let him taste it. A free sample of one of the agonies waiting to claim him.

She doesn’t need words to start, no gloating or invocation or needless purple prose; just reaches, silently, smoothly into the river of her domain, and when the water rushes in, she doesn’t protest against the current.

She sees the line between them; hatred, disdain, wrath; and as if it was the easiest thing in the world, leads the water down to him. Lets him feel it, see the pain he’d brought, her wrath like a sword stabbed into the flesh of his mind, swarms him with it as the dam of control breaks, the floodgates open.

In the real world, as she opens her eyes, Arumis glides into the open air like Jonah’s owl never will again.

In the one in her mind, vast and cruel and beautiful, the river rages. Down at its very end, at the delta wide like an ocean and deeper than the Earth’s core, a beast awakens.

The Ceaseless Watcher of both worlds, one and the same, drinks it all in as Jonah begins to drown.

“What—“ 

He gasps with genuine confusion before he falls to his knees, his hand at his throat.

Peter makes another step back.

She doesn’t relent.

Begins walking again, step by step, until she thinks she might be looming; like the dark, slender body of the Leviathan himself with too many glassy eyes and too sharp teeth in jaws wide open. Jonah coughs, but there is no water, and he doesn’t understand and she doesn’t care.

The river carries more of her terror to him with another wave like a tsunami and he strains through struggling chords: “Peter—“

The man to her right looks as if he’d rather die than get anywhere close to her.

Jonah coughs and heaves and squirms under the merciless stare of the Leviathan coming awake in a once-human body, descending with its full power that the world hadn’t felt in millennia, feeding off of his fear and its iron-tinged sweetness.  
“Peter, _now!_ ”

This time, when she feels the cold come in, she just closes her eyes and lets herself be taken.

—

She hears Peter die and it makes her chuckle against the empty horizon of the all-too-familiar Forsaken, contrasting the way the fog snaps and stills, but she knows it won’t mourn.

She doesn’t worry, this time. She’s walked this road before.

She finds them even before they leave; the Leviathan coaxed to slumber but the Watcher’s rivers flowing as quickly as ever as she walks forward, threading through the receding white; leading her home.

Jon smiles when he sees her, waves at her from the distance, stirring the fog clinging to Martin like steam above a mug.

She smiles back and follows.

—

She’s never been to Scotland before and doesn’t have expectations; recreational travel never quite made it into the list of her interests, mostly because of Arumis. But the cottage is lovely, she decides; quite generous to say of a shack where the only marginally aesthetical thing could be the fireplace.

She never thought she’d witness tension and relief; misery and joy; in one place together at once, but they swirl together between the four of them in the tiny cottage. Their individual demons haunting them from the distance of their memory and the last question hanging like an incoming pendulum above their heads.

But they work it out; slowly, surely, through pain and panic and uncomfortable conversations and sleeping on the floor with nothing but blankets and waking up complaining.

Tim blinds himself and later, Balthazar uncurls for the first time in years, safe in Sasha’s hands.

—

She tracks the statement from London with the eyes in her mind; wonders if Jonah really thought that would work for him or had just grown too lazy to change. An old dog unwilling to learn new tricks.

She supposed he knew he’d lost it long ago. Maybe not. Maybe it’s a trap.

She has a lot of hubris, however, and counts it as another win.

It comes in a box, not even masked as it lies on the very top of the pile. She skims it and then reads it fully; curled up on the floor under a blanket as the fireplace crackles behind her and gives her the warmth and light she needs.

She’ll remember it, word for word, she knows that. Seared into her brain.

She writhes with rage in complete silence, her nails digging into the skin at her knee as she reads it again and again, almost hears Jonah’s voice glistening with awful, sick pride, building his monument of abuse and carrying its story to paper with expensive black ink.

She doesn’t doubt he’d try to spring the trap again. They’ll have to watch out for it forever, never relaxing, dropping their watch.

She wants to tear it apart but doesn’t.

She calmly relays what it contained, a rough outline, the trick.

It’s dark outside when she goes to burn it.

The lights inside stay on, giving her the light she needs to not stumble over some rock or plant she otherwise wouldn’t be able to see, and the yellow light turns the long grass to thin lines of copper shining in the dark.

The wind howls, but not strong enough to ruin attempts at creating fire, not that it matters.

They’ll have to get rid of that damn lighter one day, but now she needs it.

She could’ve thrown it into the fireplace, but the thought of its remains; even if reduced to ash; staying anywhere close to them in their temporary home makes her sick.

She’ll let it vanish between the damp grass faintly smelling of recent rain, into the wind that ruffles her hair and makes little ripples on the water of Arumis’ tank when she settles it down into the grass.

The soft (no doubt expensive) paper burns fast; curls into itself and destroys the black lines held within in as its own corners blacken, then briefly shine, then fall apart.

The grass rustles with the steps of somebody else incoming and she turns, the papers already gone with the last of the sun.

She knows it’s Jon, even before she turns, their connection unique in its own terrible way; two eyes of the Watcher, wide open and aware.

His eyes shine faintly with venomous green coating the kindness.

“It’s gone.” He says, looking into the valley as if following the specks and pieces of a destroyed threat.

She follows his gaze, surveys the mountains and the stars.

“It is.”

“What do we do now?”

He’ll ask it again when they’re all together and ready for planning instead of tired and relieved and aching for rest after years of having none. Now, she suspects he doesn’t expect an answer from her, not anything world-breaking or constructive or thought-out, throwing the question to her like a ball to catch.

“I suppose we’ll just have to live.” She looks back at him with the clunky answer that doesn’t quite fit the typical structure of a sentence.

He shoves his hands in the pockets of his coat and hums, looking down at the ground.

She sighs and turns to the starry sky once again.

Making a little swaying circle in the grass to search it in its partially-obstructed entirety (damn clouds), she eventually spots what she needs and points in the vague direction with a smile on her lips. “Look, Rigel!”

He turns to look too, face blank, tired. A little bit sad.

The light from the inside illuminates his hair, catches on the rims of his glasses, and turns them golden.

They stay there in silence that neither of them really wants to break and cold seeps into her, making her regret not bringing her better jacket in the rush, but she doesn’t move.

She (apparently, she still can’t believe it) withstood _months_ of cold, she can survive a few minutes.

“How are you so...accepting of it?” He asks, not changing his position but for the restless movement of his hands, now fiddling with the sleeves of the coat.

“Of what?” She doesn’t move either, trying to find Sirius in the mess of arbitrary made-up lines in the sky she was never good at anyway.

“Of being a— a monster and all that.” Again, looking down as if in shame.

She tilts her head. “I don’t really know.”

She can’t remember whether Sirius is above or below Rigel and curses herself for not paying more attention to the other stars but Rigel. (She wanted to cheer Jon up, was the point.)

He hums again, biting at his lip.

“I don’t feel good about it,” she starts again because she can’t leave it at that, “of course, it forces me to, you know, that’s the satisfaction bullshit, but as me? I really don’t.”

She narrows her eyes, tries to think over the moments she noticed, when it dawned on her, and when she decided not to care. “I think...there was always something more to come and I never gave myself the time to think about it, not really.”

A pause. He snorts and meets her eyes.

“You procrastinated your own monsterhood?”

“I guess I did.” 

She means the smile she returns him and when an idea springs into her head, she lets it turn sharper, mischievous, like the look they shared in Research just before delivering a pun so awful it made even Martin groan. 

“Do you want to see it?”

“Yes,” he says and it takes all the breath out of him, his eyes wider, the irises shining brighter like a pair of nebulae after a supernova. She remembers the Archivist staring into the water in her dreams, unable to see her, but always searching.

She plunges into the river with a sort of joy of returning home, but lets the feeling slide off of her, unable to stick to her armored skin and fragile fins and when she’s sure of it — of the flow and the pressure and power — she opens her eyes, and Arumis leaves the water.

She meets his eyes again. He’s smiling a crooked sort of a grin.

“Fish eyes. Suits you, somehow.”

She chuckles despite the power that she doesn’t need, not right now, not here, her arms and shoulders relaxed, her mind adrift. “Wow, thanks.”

He cringes, and as the colors of the world shift into ones she has no name for, she thinks that whatever hue of light caught on his dark hair fits him as well. “Was that the strangest compliment you’ve ever gotten?”

“No, not really.” She thinks she could stay like this forever; the cold distant and so like the water, Arumis close to her and free, her friends near, safer than they’d ever been. 

She goes further down the memory lane. “No, I think that place goes to ‘I bet you’re really good at cleaning’ guy.”

“Oh my g-d.”

“Yep. That’s just what flirting is, with fish daemons.”

He looks away to her right and she closes her eyes, just feeling the wind and listening to their breathing, not the ground herself as much as to bask in the moment.

She still can’t find the damn Sirius. The changed color scheme doesn’t help at all.

“A guy in uni once asked me if I was an arsonist.” He mutters.

Her eyes snap open. “What?”

“You know, the whole ‘like a moth to the flame’ thing?”

“ _Wow._ ”

His chuckle is soft, a sweet sound against the cold wind that makes him have to put his hair away from his face every few seconds. 

She grins. “Well...you still decided to date an arsonist, so…”

He makes a choked sound before falling into stutters and the look she gives him only makes it worse. “O-oh, no, no, first off, we’re not dating yet,”

“Yet.”

“Yes, yet.” A firm, definitive, _Please I’d rather eat a glass than continue this now_ end of a sentence.

“If you say so.”

She goes back to the stars, finding the constellation she needs momentarily obstructed by clouds with a pang of disappointment.

He chuckles again and turns to the house. “I can’t believe you called Martin an arsonist.”

“I mean, I’m right?”

“Sure.”

“It even fits together, you know, the Archivist and the Arsonist—“

He cringes, pained. “No, that’s— too close to the Desolation.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

She’s the one who looks down on her boots this time, mulling over the interaction, now that the water has moved to nothing but background noise.

She accepted it, yes, but she realizes that she doesn’t want it; its hunger, its freedom-at-a-price, its power.

It’s helpful from time to time, she supposes, that’s the real reason she accepted it, desperate for help. But she can do just fine like this, standing outside at night in a comfortable conversation without a purpose but to connect, distantly hoping for the sky’s mercy to not send rain their way.

She watches as he digs the box out of his pockets and gently picks Rigel out of it, placing his limp, frozen-in-time body into his palm. She doesn’t know what good it’ll do, if anything, but doesn’t comment on it.

He frowns, after another few minutes. 

(She can’t for the love of all things holy find Polaris and as an Avatar of Knowledge or whatever feels kind of stupid about it. The sky is to blame, she thinks. Hopes.)

“Do you have a title?” The question is somewhat hesitant; curious.

“A what?”

“Like...like me, you know, the Archivist and all that.”

She mulls it over. “I don’t think ‘the Assistant’ fits in any way.”

“Oh, it really doesn’t.”

She forgets the stars and lets her 15-year-old edgy self run free as she thinks, hard, because she’s an Avatar, and really, why doesn’t she have a title? 

“G-d, I really hope nobody tries to call me Fish-eyes.”

“Tim would.”

She groans. “Yeah, he would.”

“The Leviathan sounds cool though.” Arumis butts into the conversation, floating off to Sasha’s left ear.

“Oh, Thomas Hobbs sympathizer? Blocked and reported.” Jon laughs and neither of them misses the way that Arumis wiggles at her success.

“Did Tim teach you that?”

“What?” 

“The ‘Blocked and reported’ joke.”

“Why?” He says, with playful defensiveness.

“Because by G-d I know you still have a Nokia.”

“Okay, first off, I don’t, excuse you,” he exaggerates and oh my g-d, maybe Tim isn’t the only theater kid, “second off, no, it was Martin, who, dare I remind you, drives a car manufactured in the early _eighties._ ”

“Oh wow, dragging him behind his back?” She raises her eyebrows. “At least he’s not driving a Lada.”

“A what?” Oh, she didn’t mean to say that, but oh well. Can’t hurt, especially with the smile on his face when he asks, the sort of _I know this is going to be funny and I want to know, yes please_ question.

“Oh, um, a— one of the soviet cars? People used to joke that you could if you rammed it into a tank the car would wreck it and come out unscathed.”

He nods. “A car equivalent of a Nokia, then?”

“Basically. Plus ugly as hell.”

“Ugly compared to what?”

“...Nokias?” She answers, sheepish, unsure.

The water recedes to a distant, soothing force behind her eyes, and the colors slowly fade into the ones she’s used to; into the yellow of the light and the teal of the horizon and the greyish blue of the clouds against the dark, vast sky.

He tilts his head to the sky, laughing. “Finally, _finally_ somebody else than me who has no sense of aesthetic.” 

She sputters, deadpanning: “That’s the worst you’ve ever insulted me.”

It only makes him laugh more. “Sorry, you have to accept the truth!” Oh, he looks delighted. Bastard.

“ _What._ ”

“I happen to be an Avatar of Endless Terrible Knowledge, ergo, I am correct.”

Arumis turns her whole body from Sasha to Jon and back as if she were in a tennis match.

“Oh my g-d.” She lays her hands at her temples.

Fine, she’ll let him have it.

She smirks and pretends to bow. “Fine, you win, you were right, I have never in my life understood the concept of beauty and from now on, you shall be my _humble_ advisor.”

“I think you should come to Tim with that —he’d have the time of his life.”

She straightens again, just now noticing the soreness of her legs, and has to blink white dots out of her vision for a few seconds because oh lord, blood pressure. Who would’ve thought. “Oh, he would.”

A pause.

“We should head back inside,” he voices what they both think, just as she manages to find the g-ddamn Orion again.

“Just a moment—“ she says and he looks up with wide, curious eyes. “Please tell me where the _hell_ Sirius is. I’ve been trying to find it for, like, the entire duration of this conversation.”

He turns to the sky and frowns in concentration and she sees his eyes flick from star to star before he announces, decisively, pointing at the sky: “That one.”

“Uh…”

He steps close to her and leans against her side; his eyes at the same level as her shoulders because, g-d, he is _short_ ; and she sees him scoop Rigel to his other hand before he uses his now-free hand to lead her own roughly to the star, and there it is.

“Oh! Thanks.”

The smile he returns her is so, so bright.

Arumis, from some unidentifiable reason totally unrelated to Sasha thinking _G-d, I love him_ , chooses that moment to land, gently, on the back of his hand.

And Sasha doesn’t feel weak, no; she feels soft, and safe and in love and loved at once as Jon breathes out a short “Oh…” that seems to take with it the last of the tension, leaving behind space for something else; something better; to fill.

She lowers her hand but he doesn’t quite let go of it, still standing close.

“Leviathan sounds cool, by the way,” he says, half-directing it at Sasha and half at Arumis. “I just needed to get the obscure literature trivia out.”

She chuckles. “Oh, don’t we all.” 

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a twitch of movement in the one of Jon’s hands not currently occupied by a seven-inch ancistrus.

Hope really hides in the smallest of places, she thinks. 

When she goes to gather her tank, after her breathing comes harder and Arumis, begrudgingly, leaves Jon’s hand, he speaks out to the night sky with an expression of amused wonder. “How did we even get from...becoming a monster to soviet cars?”

She scoffs. “We’re talented, obviously.” 

“Obviously.”

She stands, tank in hand, and begins slowly threading back to the front door through the thick never-mowed grass and wildflowers. “You know, we should start a design company.”

“What?”

“Well, you know everything and I could make us a fucking amazing website. Why settle at no aesthetic when we could have _all_ the aesthetic.”

“Sure.” A chuckle. “How do we call it?”

“Hmmm…J&J? Jonathan and James?”

“G-d, that sounds _awful._ ”

She agrees.

“I know, yeah, it does. What about, ah,” there comes the mischief again, “...the Design Archive.”

“That’s even _worse._ ”

“Come on, admit you like it.” She teases.

“I get why you and Tim are such great friends now.”

“Aw, no, you love us.” Whoops.

Jon blinks. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

A tension against her throat she didn’t even know about lessens and falls apart. “Love you too.”

He smiles.

Before the door opens, she hears the sound of fluttering wings.

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first ever long fic that I finished so I'm really, really hype abt this! I hope u had a good read cvhjsvcghs. Kudos & comments are appreciated, thank you for reading!
> 
> If u wanna yell at me abt this fic or somehow miraculously found information on precisely how many color cones do ancistrus have, i'm on tumblr as @sisyphean-everchase vhdvhdccfg


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